Emory University: Pitts Theology Library

Pitts Theology Library holds one of America’s premier hymnody collections. The core of the collection, roughly 8700 volumes known as the Warrington-Pratt-Soule Collection of Hymnody and Psalmody, came to Emory University in 1975 from Hartford Seminary’s library. Together with what Emory held before this acquisition and what has been added since, the hymnody collection now numbers more than 20,000 hymnals and books on hymnody. The collection includes a rich variety of church music types, from psalm paraphrases to oblong tunebooks and shape-note hymnals. There are over 9,000 items from the nineteenth century and 8,500 from the twentieth century and nearly 800 from the eighteenth century. Several sixteenth-century Lutheran hymnals represent the earliest items in the collection, including the Achtliederbuch, the first published Protestant hymnal. All bibliographic records are searchable through Emory’s online catalog (https://search.libraries.emory.edu/). In the early 1990s, 4,093 embrittled hymnals, printed between 1800 and 1950, were microfilmed as part of the Research Libraries Group’s Great Collections program. In 1997–1998, the NEH funded a second preservation microfilming project that encompassed over 600 additional embrittled hymnals, which had been more recently acquired. More recently, the library has partnered with Sounding Spirit, a project supported by the NEH, to digitize and make publicly accessible hundreds of sacred songbooks published between 1850 and 1925. In addition to collecting printed hymnals, the library also has numerous archival collections related to hymn writing, collecting, and interpretation. The hymnody collection is securely stored in the Special Collections stacks with carefully controlled temperature and humidity and a waterless fire suppression system. The library continues to add hymnals and materials related to hymnody in various languages and from different time periods. Date range: 16th–21st c.